Guy Ware: So what’s a co-op council?

Guy Ware is S151 officer and strategic director, enabling, at Lambeth Borough Council

Working at Lambeth, the question I get asked a lot – enough (to quote the very great Tom Waits) that I would remark on it – is: “So what’s a co-operative council, then?”

Unlike Tom Waits, you don’t have to go all the way back to the Civil War for the answer. But you could go back to 2010, and the Lambeth Cooperative Commission report. There you’d find a clear commitment to explore new ways of thinking about and delivering public services, of transferring power from the council to its citizens and communities, of shifting from a “deficit model” – where the needs of the community are seen as problems for the council to fix – to an “asset model”, where we seek to bring together all of the resources we have at our collective disposal (ideas, local knowledge, professional skills, time, energy, money and buildings) and use them to deliver what people want. But plenty of people have read that document, and still asked: But what does it really mean, though?

Well, here’s an example: the Young Lambeth Coop[1] is a membership organisation open to anyone in the borough over 11. It was set up with the council’s help, but is not owned or run by the council. We have a seat on the board, and we provide professional financial, legal and employment advice where they need it. We’re also handing over control of £9m so the YLC can decide for itself what sort of playgrounds and youth clubs the borough should have. We’re not consulting them, they’re telling us.

Here’s another: our citizens want the council to be the custodian of our parks and open spaces. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to help improve them. Working with a host of “friends” and other groups we’ve developed a strategy to invest our own (and other people’s) capital to enhance the quality and revenue-generating capacity of our parks. A proportion of the income will be earmarked for the groups to manage on-going maintenance and improvements.

These examples don’t fit a single formula. Despite some of the early publicity, we’re not a “John Lewis Council” (any more than we’re a “Coop” council in the Paul Flowers not-knowing-what-your-business-is-worth-to-the-nearest-£30bn sense) because mutual ownership is only a small aspect of what co-operation means.

But underpinning each initiative is a fundamental philosophy that none of us has all the answers. You get better answers – and more interesting questions – when you don’t start from what the council needs to do (or cut) but from what our citizens most want to see, and what resources we have between us to make it happen.

For our finance team, this isn’t always easy. It often means suspending judgment: allowing new ideas about funding, sharing and controlling resources to breathe, not stamping them out at birth. It means exploring new skills to support colleagues, partners and the community. And it means helping the council completely overhaul the way we budget, mapping and targeting our resources to priority outcomes.[2]

Does it work? Well, at least in one way dear to the hearts of Room 151 readers it does. A few months ago I wrote about the £115m we had to save by 2017/18. We’ve now identified all but £18m.

Cooperation helps unlock budget problems we wouldn’t have been able to tackle before. It’s helped start some long-term shifts of resources from acute services to prevention and early intervention. We know our approach isn’t perfect. The speed at which we’ve had to work to balance budgets means we haven’t always involved our citizens – rather than their representatives – as much as we would like.

We don’t have all the answers – but the whole point of cooperation is that we shouldn’t. So we’re not there yet – and we never will be. Cooperation is a way of working, a direction of travel, not a destination. As Tom Waits also said, “Hell’s boiling over and heaven is full./We’re chained to the world and we’ve all got to pull.”

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